High-flying streaming at the World Gliding Championships

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New cameras and new streaming technology gave web viewers an eye in the sky at this year’s World Gliding Championships

In January of this year, Benalla, Australia – halfway between Melbourne and Canberra - was host to the 34th FAI World Gliding Championships. The World Gliding Championships are held every two years by the FAI World Gliding Commissions. This year 29 nations competed and winners were Russell Cheetham of the UK, Killian Walbrou of France and Sebastian Kawa of Poland.

In previous years, streaming of the event had been very basic using only a single static camera. Consequently, gliding spectators had had a very difficult time engaging with the sport.

But with the advent of a new generation of small, high resolution cameras, this year’s World Gliding Championships were able to provide stunning footage from inside the gliders and from all around the event. This footage was captured and streamed globally using Telestream’s Wirecast live streaming software. The streaming coverage climaxed in the final three days of the event when over 12 hours of live action – much of it captured by the pilots - was streamed over YouTube and the World Gliding Championships website.

Wirecast is cross-platform, live streaming production software that enables capture, live production and encoding of live streams for broadcast to multiple servers and platforms simultaneously. The software is optimised for live streaming to most social networks includin Facebook Live, Twitter Periscope and YouTube Live.

With Wirecast, users can stream multiple live cameras while dynamically mixing in other media such as movies, images and sounds, and adding production features such as transitions, built-in titles, chroma key, virtual sets and live scoreboards.

Using Wirecast, more content than ever was streamed to the World Gliding Championship’s YouTube channel. Content was edited and uploaded quickly and efficiently to both the YouTube channel and its website, ensuring that viewers did not miss out on the best of the action. By the end of the event nearly 200,000 video views, over two million web page views and two million social media views had been recorded.

Sean Young, media relations, web master and content director for the World Gliding Championships explained: ‘’Our aim was to make a live TV channel for followers of our website and social media. The ability to stream content from the championships transformed our media footprint and gave our international viewers a chance to be involved.’

‘’Wirecast was a core part of the production mix, speeding up ingest, handling graphical overlays and managing the streaming and posting content. Wirecast greatly increased the speed of production and delivery, making the volume of video that we produced possible. It was very easy to use, and I am sure that someone coming from either no experience or a live broadcast environment would have no problems.”